If you are using one of the two VMware Live Recovery services to to protect your VMs - VMware Live Site Recovery or VMware Live Cyber Recovery - you might want to change VM protection from one services to the other.

Both VMware Live Site Recovery and VMware Live Cyber Recovery provide data protection for your VMs, but in different ways. VMware Live Site Recovery:
  • VMware Live Site Recovery is an end-to-end disaster recovery solution that uses array-based, VMware vSphere Replication host-based, or VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) replication along with orchestration.
  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery is an easy-to-use, just-in-time ransomware and disaster recovery (DR) solution, delivered as SaaS, with cloud economics.
Note: You can protect a VM using both VMware Live Site Recovery and VMware Live Cyber Recovery, but several resrictions apply. For more information, see Protecting the Same VM with Both VMware Live Site Recovery and VMware Live Cyber Recovery.
Can I Switch VM Protection from One Service to the Other?

The answer is yes!

For example, let's say you buy a 100 VM SKU for VMware Live Recovery, and starts protecting these on-premises VMs using VMware Live Site Recovery. At a later date, you want to switch protection of 50 of those VMs to use VMware Live Cyber Recovery.

In the other use case, you want the opposite. You buy a 100 VM SKU for VMware Live Recovery and start protecting these VMs using VMware Live Cyber Recovery. At a later date, you want to switch protection 50 of those VMs to use VMware Live Site Recovery.

What is required to “stop protecting” VMs using one service and start protecting VMs using the other?

How to Stop Protecting VMs with VMware Live Site Recovery and Start Protecting them with VMware Live Cyber Recovery

If you want to switch VM protection from VMware Live Site Recovery to VMware Live Cyber Recovery, you need to follow these steps:
  1. Remove protection from the VM in VMware Live Site Recovery.
  2. If you are using vSphere Replication for the VM, then follow these instructions to stop replicating a virtual machine.

    If you are using VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) for replication, you need remove the replication group the VM belongs to on the storage array, and then remove the storage policy from the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) interface.

    If you are using array-based replication, consult the vendor's documentation on how to stop replication for the VM.

  3. Once you have stopped replication of the VM from VMware Live Site Recovery, you can now create a VMware Live Cyber Recovery protection group by defining its membership to include the VM and setting a snapshot schedule.

How to Stop Protecting VMs with VMware Live Cyber Recovery and Start Protecting them with VMware Live Site Recovery

In VMware Live Cyber Recovery, VMs are protected by protection group, which has a dynamic membership based on queries, folders, and tags.

To ‘unprotect’ a VM from a protection group, do the following:
  • If the protection group is using a VM name pattern, change the name pattern so it does not include the VM name. Or, add an explicit exclusion so the protection group ignores the VM.
  • If the protection group is using tag queries, remove those tags from the VM you want to unprotect.
  • If the protection group is using folder queries, manually move the VM to a folder not configured in the protection group.
  • Delete all snapshots of the VM from all protection groups it was previously included in.
  • If the VM was being protected by high-frequency snapshots, you must deactivate the high-freqency snapshots from the VM.

After these tasks are completed, allow roughly two to three days for space reclamation processes to completely remove the remaining VM snapshots. This process can take longer if there are a large number of snapshots to delete.

Now, you can set up replication as needed for VMware Live Site Recovery: